Bardisms (11 page)

THAT KID’S GOT BEHAVIOR ISSUES

In the event that your ten-year-old isn’t quite as inspiring as young Mamillius, don’t worry, Shakespeare’s got you covered, too. Grandma’s priceless vase in smithereens at the foot of the mantel? Crayon on the living room wall? Play-Doh in your underwear drawer? Try this Bardism:

Out, you mad-headed ape!

A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen

As you are tossed with.

—L
ADY
P
ERCY
,
Henry IV, Part I
, 2.3.69–71

Some details:

In context, Lady Percy is talking not to a wild toddler but to her husband, Hotspur, who’s characteristically acting like one. Her speech is a lot of fun, filled as it is with vivid and unexpected language. The distance between it and a simple paraphrase of what it says shows just how colorful and energetic Shakespeare’s English can be.

The basic sense is: “Enough, you crazy monkey! You’re more ornery than a weasel.” These ten words may communicate the same ideas as Shakespeare’s eighteen, but they’re nowhere near as terrific. Just consider how much texture and nuance Lady Percy manages to convey with her version of my dry prose.
Out
is an interjection similar in meaning to “fie.” That is, she’s not literally telling Hotspur to leave the room, but she is chastising him (compare the use of the contemporary phrase “Get outta here!” to mean “Stop that!”).
Spleen
means anger or willfulness, because that organ was believed to be the seat of those emotions, an idea that survives in the adjective “splenetic,” which describes someone irritable or hotheaded. The verb
tossed
in this context means disturbed or, possibly, shaken.
Weasels
in Shakespeare are always splenetic troublemakers, who weasel their way into places they don’t belong, often birds’ nests, and—pop!—unleash all sorts of mayhem, usually by sucking the yolks out of eggs sitting there innocent and vulnerable. (“I can suck melancholy from a song,” says Jaques rather deliciously in
As You Like It
, “as a weasel sucks eggs.”)
Apes
, too, are for Shakespeare angry and frantic animals who generally do damage and cause chaos.

A side benefit of quoting these lines to your rampaging little one—and I’ve field-tested them with a wayward nephew—is that in addition to venting some of your own spleen, its surprise mentions of apes and weasels will stop the kid in his tracks. Alas, after a few seconds, if my test subject is predictive of the general course of things, he’ll give you a quizzical look and go right back to trashing the joint. But this Shakespeare on the Occasion of a Temper Tantrum will provide at least a momentary reprieve.

SHAKESPEARE ON SCHOOL

’Twere good he were schooled.

—P
EDANT
,
The Taming of the Shrew
,
4.4.9

A place we creep toward in the morning, run from in the afternoon, and hate being at for the hours in between hardly seems worth commenting on, let alone waxing poetic about, and indeed, Shakespeare doesn’t say much about school itself beyond how loathsome it is. To be sure, he puts a couple of teachers in his plays and he even dramatizes a lesson or two, but these usually function as pretexts for some other dramatic action: a romantic hookup, say, or the relaying of a secret message…about a romantic hookup, say. School as civic institution and education as a bedrock civic value just don’t attract much attention in the plays.

Perhaps Shakespeare didn’t feel it necessary to state what must have struck him as obvious about the value of schooling. After all, his own tremendous erudition proves that an education is a useful thing to have. Or, on the other hand, perhaps Shakespeare kept mum because he recognized something essentially disappointing about the institutions of formal education, something we continue to wrestle with in our own society: inevitably, they fall short of the ideals we hold them to. The gap between the public good school is meant to confer and the rough-and-tumble reality of schooling as it’s conducted in the day-today is enough to break the heart of even the most bright-eyed educational theorist, in our time as in the Renaissance.

The Bard’s own life bears out a certain skepticism toward formal education. We know he did not attend university, yet much anecdotal evidence survives about Shakespeare the autodidact: he was an almost constant presence in the bookstores of London. It makes sense. Without what must have been nearly round-the-clock reading, he could have amassed neither the preternatural store of knowledge he displays in his works, nor his apparently exhaustive familiarity with the literature of his day and the centuries before. Clearly, he was an advocate of what we’d today call continuing education. He records his endorsement of self-guided tutelage in
The Taming of the Shrew
, when Bianca tells two would-be tutors,

I am no breeching scholar in the schools;

I’ll not be tied to hours nor ’pointed times,

But learn my lessons as I please myself.

(File that Bardism under Shakespeare for the Occasion of Dropping Out of School!)

Shakespeare’s skepticism of formal education rarely gets more intense than Bianca’s petulant dismissal, but when it does, it veers close to utter despair. There’s no more damning indictment of learning than that delivered by Caliban in Act 1 of
The Tempest
, arguably one of Shakespeare’s most world-weary and fed-up of plays. A native on the island occupied by the exiled Milanese duke Prospero—who is, not incidentally, an obsessive reader—Caliban resists Prospero’s efforts to “civilize” him through education. He denounces his overlord’s patronizing attitude in searing terms:

You taught me language; and my profit on’t

Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you

For learning me your language!

The only reason to learn language is so that you can curse. That’s strong stuff. But even if Shakespeare meant it as he wrote it, he surely also knew that Caliban’s sentences, with their alliterative
r
’s and
l
’s, sophisticated punning (
red
/
rid
), and complex rhythmic structure, contradict the very thought they express. They show that while Shakespeare may not have liked school, he managed to find a way to abide schooling, or at least its results. It’s a paradoxical stance that’s typically Shakespearean.

STUDY WHAT YOU LOVE

Here’s a Bardism for that second-semester sophomore who can’t decide what major to declare.

Good master, while we do admire

This virtue and this moral discipline,

Let’s be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray,

Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks

As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured. 5

Balk logic with acquaintance that you have,

And practice rhetoric in your common talk.

Music and poesy use to quicken you;

The mathematics and the metaphysics,

Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you. 10

No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en.

In brief, sir, study what you most affect.

—T
RANIO
,
The Taming of the Shrew
, 1.1.29–40

In other words:

Listen, boss. We all think highly of ethics and morality. But—please—let’s not eliminate fun altogether, or turn ourselves into stuffed shirts. Let’s not dedicate ourselves to a life of restraint and throw away pleasure altogether. (Let’s not get all hung up with that stickler Aristotle about stuff like right and wrong, and throw Ovid’s stories about people who get naked right out the window.) Work on your analytical skills by figuring out how to split the check. Use linguistic theory in your everyday chitchat. By all means listen to music and read poetry, but purely for your enjoyment. As for math and philosophy, get involved in that stuff only when you’re really in the mood. You can’t learn anything if you’re miserable. Here’s my point: as far as study goes, stick to the subjects you like.

How to say it:

I wish I’d known this passage when I overheard a college roommate on the phone with his parents, explaining to them why he’d decided to drop one of his required pre-med classes in order to take African Drum Ensemble instead. “But Mom, Dad, I’m just following Shakespeare’s advice!”

These lines of early-career Shakespeare flow easily and reveal their sense without requiring too much decoding. A few comments on the handful of terms that are a bit obscure should help get you past any bumps:

• Stoics
  /
  stocks
  . This witty little antithesis puns on the ancient Stoic philosophy, a worldview that advocated austerity and repression, and welcomed suffering.
  Stocks
  are the awkward penal device that restrained a prisoner’s legs between large blocks of wood. To compare a person to the stocks is to suggest that person is heavy, dull, and overly restrictive.
  
• Aristotle
  is here lumped in with the Stoics because he argued that only the contemplative life was worth living, an assertion that earned him a reputation as an ascetic. His
  checks
  are his principles of monk-like self-denial.
  
• Ovid
  , apparently Shakespeare’s favorite author, was renowned not only for the
  Metamorphoses
  , his masterpiece about life, death, and transformation, but also for his erotic poetry, which was probably more widely read. His
  Ars Amatoria
  (
  The Art of Love
  ) features a lot of nudity, by the way.
  
• To
  balk logic
  is to banter about that subject; “trade quibbles” would be a decent paraphrase.
  Quicken
  means “enliven,” and
  stomach
  here means “appetite.”
  

An important feature of this speech is the subtle way in which Tranio portrays all philosophy as a big, humorless drag. He manages to make
Aristotle
and
Ovid
into antithetical thinkers, the second a wild and crazy pornographer, the first all heavy and dark. Your listener may not be aware of these aspects of these classic authors’ personas, so you must help them hear these qualities as you say the speech.
Aristotle
is a pill,
Ovid
a delight.
Virtue
and
moral philosophy
,
stoics
and
stocks
, are downers. On the other hand,
acquaintance
,
common talk
,
quicken
, and
stomach
are bright, attractive, warm, and fun. It’s a question of how you color the words as you say them. If you
think
“spry,” “fun,” and “gamesome” as you say
quicken
, the word will come out of your mouth so inflected, and the argument you’re making will roar to life.

Good mistress
rather than
good master
aims the speech at a woman.